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● Links 27/12/2022: vkd3d-proton 2.8 and Zephix 6

Posted in News Roundup at 12:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

=> ↺ Report: Over 33 Million Desktop Linux users, worldwide

• Measuring the market share of Linux has been an elusive goal since the beginning of Linux itself — with most attempts at understanding the total number of Linux users based on nothing more than “Star maths and wishy thinking.”

Audiocasts/Shows

=> ↺ Qubes OS – First Impressions – Invidious

• my first impressions of qubes os the reasonably secure operating system

=> ↺ Valve Funds More Than Just Linux Gaming Patches – Invidious

• Valve has been a massive contributor over the past few years to the linux space and not just directly involved in gaming, even for things that just benefit the general linux desktop

=> ↺ Mabox Linux – Flawless Linux Experience | Just Keeps Getting Better – Invidious

• A quick video covering the newest release of Mabox Linux. A great Linux experience with Openbox and XFCE/LXDE components. It makes using Linux flawless and completely effortless. Take a look and let me know what you think in the comments below.

Applications

=> ↺ The Best Virtual Machine for Linux: KVM vs. VirtualBox vs. QEMU vs. Hyper-V

• QEMU, KVM, VirtualBox, and Hyper-V are virtualization technologies that allow you to run multiple operating systems on a single physical machine. While they all serve a similar purpose, there are some key differences between these technologies that are worth noting.

• Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) is an open-source virtualization solution built into the Linux kernel. It allows you to create and run virtual machines on a Linux host system using hardware acceleration, providing high performance and low overhead. KVM is often used in production environments due to its stability and reliability.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ What is cron and how do you use it? | ZDNET

• Linux is one of the most flexible operating systems on the planet. There is very little you can’t do with Linux… even automate tasks using a simple command line tool.

• The tool in question is called cron and it allows you to schedule jobs for the Linux operating system.

=> ↺ How to Change the Default sudo Password Timeout on Linux

• When you run the sudo command in Linux, it remembers the password for 15 minutes by default, determined by the timestamp_timeout variable in the /etc/sudoers file. So during this time, you can run any other sudo command without providing the password. It prompts for a password again after 15 minutes of sudo inactivity.

• However, you can tweak the default timeout period and make it longer or shorter according to your preferences. You can also configure it in a way that it always asks for a password or ask for it once per terminal session or system boot. Here’s how you can do this.

=> ↺ How to install Moshi Moshi Rewritten Desktop on KDE Neon – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Moshi Moshi Rewritten Desktop on KDE Neon. Enjoy!

=> ↺ How To Install UrBackup on Debian 11 – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install UrBackup on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, UrBackup is a free and open-source network backup and disaster recovery software. It is designed to back up and restore files, folders, and entire systems. urBackup also provides a web administration interface, which makes it users easier to set up and configure. urBackup available on Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.

• This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the UrBackup on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

=> ↺ How to install Gacha Life on a Chromebook

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install UrBackup on Debian 11 (Bullseye), as well as some extra requirements for UrBackup

=> ↺ What are hidden files in Linux and how do you create them? | ZDNET

• Linux is a very powerful operating system. Although having that much power at your fingertips might give you the impression that Linux is quite challenging, modern Linux distributions go a long way to proving that assumption wrong.

• Take, for instance, the hidden file, which is a file that is not visible by default. The file is still there, unencrypted for anyone to view, so long as you know where it is and how to view it.

• That brings up an important point. Hidden files are not password-protected, so anyone can view the contents of the file, so long as they know how.

• Because of that, you should not keep sensitive information (such as bank accounts and passwords) in these files. Although you’re tucking those files away from the casual viewer, any user with even the slightest bit of Linux experience will be able to view those files.

=> ↺ Mount Windows Folders from Linux

• In this post, you will learn how to mount Windows shared folders on Linux. You will be surprised how easy it is. Let’s get started.

• One of the most common situations we face in a network is file sharing. Although many sysadmins may not like it, it is often the fastest way to share information within the organization.

• Previously, we have explained how to install and configure a Samba server which is an important method for this purpose, but being a server, it requires a central Linux machine.

• How to do it the other way around? That is to say that it is Windows that shares the folder, you will see.

WINE or Emulation

=> ↺ Wine Reviews : vkd3d-proton version 2.8 has been released

• VKD3D-Proton is a fork of VKD3D, which aims to implement the full Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan. The project serves as the development effort for Direct3D 12 support in Proton.

• This release rolls up some significant new developments before the holidays.

• [...]

• The entire API feature was rewritten from scratch to support more implementations and edge cases without a lot of per-application hacks and workarounds.

• As the most extreme example of weird API usage, Guardians of the Galaxy should (finally) run well on NVIDIA.

Games

=> ↺ Steinar H. Gunderson: The ultimate single-page app

• I run a chess analysis site as a hobby. It’s not a big thing (usually ~1k simultaneous viewers when it’s broadcasting, peak at ~27k during the London WCC), and the surface functionality is also pretty basic: It’s a single-page app picking up a JSON (updated via long-poll) from a backend containing a chess position and computer analysis, and then presents it to the viewer.

• I won’t go into detail for why this isn’t as simple as it seems, but there’s one thing I’ve always prided myself in: Making it not eat too much of people’s data caps. (It’s one of the few sites in its class that actually works pretty well on mobile, without requiring an app.) The JSON updates have been pretty meticulously pared down over time, to the point where it’s 1–2 kB/sec once you’re going, so even watching for extended periods of time should be quite cheap.

• The initial load wasn’t so bad either; you need some HTML, some CSS, a bit of JavaScript, PNGs for the chess pieces and so on… totaling about 109 kB of downloads (308 kB after un-gzip), in 18 HTTP requests. It’s not tiny, but it’s smaller than most.

• In October, I was starting to get annoyed that the PNGs were a bit pixelated on 4K screens, so I swapped them out with SVGs. (Both came from Wikipedia’s chess piece set, which has been tweaked over time, so I picked out some older ones that looked the most similar.) And in the process, I noticed that they were actually smaller; could I perhaps reduce the initial code download size a bit? (Of course, I know that this isn’t the same as the site being fast; for one, I don’t use a CDN for serving, so network latency will matter strongly, and there’s a bunch of JavaScript stuff happening.)

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

=> ↺ That was 2022 – Sophie’s Blog

• Released Pika Backup 0.4 with scheduled backups and GTK 4 & libadwaita

• Started working on a “Welcome To GNOME” website

• Refactored apps.gnome.org to share a lot of code with “Welcome to GNOME”

• Reviewed some apps for GNOME Circle and made announcements for new apps that joined

Distributions and Operating Systems

New Releases

=> ↺ Haiku Beta 4 — The Definitive Review – by Bryan Lunduke

• A lot has happened for the Haiku Operating System over the last year or two. What originally started as an open source “clone” of BeOS, really came into its own back in August of 2021 as they hired their first full time developer.

• Now, on December 23rd of 2022, Haiku Release 1 Beta 4 has been officially released.

=> ↺ Distribution Release: Zephix 6

• 2022-12-26: Zephix v6 (Zephix-6R-20221226-x86_64) was released. Fixed uEFI issue of not booting on specific systems and on latest VirtualBox; Updated base to Debian 11.6 adding corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems; Optimised the toram boot option mechanism – to boot Zephix totally in memory, it now requires 1.5GB RAM (core, firmware and desktop modules) or 512MB RAM (core module only); Updated module creation and manipulation scripts making it much easier to create new modules without having to reboot the ISO after creating a single module and also reducing the size of each module accordingly (refer to the Customise section for more details); Updated desktop and firmware modules; Optimised boot sequence code for a cleaner and smoother boot process; Added a new feature in Zephix – on boot it searches available media for modules inside a zx directory in the root of the media itself and, if found, Zephix mounts them automatically. This feature removes the need to modify the ISO to include additional custom modules; Added a new boot option called maintenance mode – Zephix will boot in single user mode and, after entering the root password, the user can do some changes before actually continue booting the system.

Fedora Family / IBM

=> ↺ Kubernetes v1.26: CPUManager goes GA | Kubernetes

• The CPU Manager is a part of the kubelet, the Kubernetes node agent, which enables the user to allocate exclusive CPUs to containers. Since Kubernetes v1.10, where it graduated to Beta, the CPU Manager proved itself reliable and fulfilled its role of allocating exclusive CPUs to containers, so adoption has steadily grown making it a staple component of performance-critical and low-latency setups.

=> ↺ [Satire] BREAKING: Red Hat CEO admits he “has no idea what Kubernetes is”

• In an exclusive interview with The Lunduke Journal, Red Hat CEO, Matt Hicks, admitted that he has “no idea what Kubernetes is” and that he thinks it “has something to do with containers or boxes or something.”

• “I asked our CTO to explain Kubernetes to me,” stated Hicks. “He said we don’t call it Kubernetes anymore. We call it K8s. So. You know. That cleared that up.”

• To better understand how the CEO of a company which offers Kubernetes solutions could not understand what it is, The Lunduke Journal reached out to the leadership of another company in the Kubernetes industry: Mark Shuttleworth, the CEO of Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

=> ↺ LINMOB.net – Weekly GNU-like Mobile Linux Update (51/2022): The last one to be published in 2022

• Ubuntu Touch 20.04 beta is the elephant in the room, but there’s more!

=> ↺ Merry Christmas from UBports | UBports Forum

• We have some very special news! Ubuntu Touch 20.04 Focal Fossa now has a beta Release Candidate update channel. To give it a trry, use the UBports Installer… or if you’re already using 20.04 Devel, change channels as normal.

=> ↺ The Fridge: Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 767

=> ↺ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 767

• Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 767 for the week of December 18 – 24, 2022.

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Lichee Pi 4A RISC-V SBC takes on Raspberry Pi 4 with TH1520 processor – CNX Software

• Lichee Pi 4A is a single board computer (SBC) powered by Alibaba T-Head TH1520 quad-core RISC-V Xuantie C910 processor @ 1.8 GHz with an Imagination GPU and a 4 TOPS NPU for AI that can compete against the Raspberry Pi 4 in terms of performance and features.

• We previously mentioned the Lichee Pi 4A (LPi4A) in our article about the Sipeed LM4A RISC-V system-on-module, but at the time we only had some benchmarks for the board and no photos and specifications about the SBC. Sipeed has now released photos and more detailed specifications and is taking “pre-orders”. So let’s have a look.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ Oppo Phones Will Get Four Android Updates From Next Year, Do Older Models Count?

=> ↺ All parents urged to check Android phones right now – don’t take the risk | The US Sun

=> ↺ How to cast your Android screen to a TV | Fox News

=> ↺ How To Open The SIM Card Slot On Your Android Phone Without The Ejector Tool

=> ↺ How to save webpages as PDF in Firefox for Android

=> ↺ RedMagic 8 Pro and Pro Plus launch as “evolved” flagship Android smartphones – NotebookCheck.net News

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ To Don’t: Helps You Quit Bad Habits

• The app is released as an open-source under the Apache 2.0 License.

Web Browsers/Web Servers

Mozilla

=> ↺ Firefox Money: Investigating the bizarre finances of Mozilla

• The Lunduke Journal spent some time with Mozilla’s financial disclosures and came away with some wild observations — bizarre expenditures (including to companies that don’t even seem to exist) and political organizations with no relationship to Mozilla’s core business.

Programming/Development

=> ↺ C++ Cmath Library

• To make Mathematical problems stress-free for the programmer, C++ offers a library that contains all the functionalities we use in our routine to solve mathematical problems. The ‘cmath’ library contains logarithmic, exponential, hyperbolic, power, trigonometric, and many more.

=> ↺ Create Texts with a Markov Chain Text Generator… and what this has to do with ChatGPT! – Learning Machines

• I will share a secret with you: at the core of the latest craze, Large Language Models (LLMs), like GPT3, its brother ChatGPT, from OpenAI or PaLM from Google, lies a (sophisticated) function for predicting the next best word, phrase or sentence based on statistics! You will say, no way!?!

• First, try an experiment with your smartphone: start some messenger or social media app and begin typing. Then tap on the suggested word in the middle above your keyboard on the display. Continue tapping and see how a sentence forms. This sentence is also based on statistics which word normally follows which other word, probably refined by your using your phone.

• Not impressed yet, then consider the following simple algorithm, called a Markov chain algorithm. We won’t go into the mathematical details of why it is called that but just take it as a simple way to create texts based on simple statistics.

=> ↺ What is survival analysis? Examples by hand and in R – Stats and R

• For the last post of the year, I would like to present a rather unknown (yet important) statistical method–survival analysis.

• Although survival analysis is a branch of statistics, it is usually not covered in introductory statistics courses and it is rather unknown to the general public. It is mostly taught in biostatistics courses or advanced statistics study programs.

• In this article, I will explain what is survival analysis, in which context and how it is used. I will explain the main tools and methods used by biostatisticians to analyze survival data and how to estimate and interpret survival curves.

=> ↺ Computing Win-Probability of T20 matches – Giga thoughts

• I am late to the ‘Win probability’ computation for T20 matches, but managed to jump on to this bus with this post. Win Probability analysis and computation have been around for some time and are used in baseball, NFL, soccer hockey and others. On T20 cricket, the following posts from White Ball Analytics & Sports Data Science were good pointers to the general approach. The data for the Win Probability computation is taken from Cricsheet.

=> ↺ Any Time At All: tweet frequency around the clock – quantixed

• Please consider this a “supplementary analysis” to my previous post looking at the frequency of tweets from my personal account over the last 12 years.

• I was curious about what times I was active on Twitter (measured by when I tweeted). Others might be interested in a solution to look at this in R.

=> ↺ Twitcher II: tweet frequency and top tweets – quantixed

• To generate these plots, it was a case of loading in the data (as described previously). I am analysing data from @clathrin and not from my quantixed Twitter account.

=> ↺ AI learns to write computer code in ‘stunning’ advance | Science | AAAS

• A new artificial intelligence (AI) system called AlphaCode is bringing humanity one step closer to that vision, according to a new study. Researchers say the system—from the research lab DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet (Google’s parent company)—might one day assist experienced coders, but probably cannot replace them.

• “It’s very impressive, the performance they’re able to achieve on some pretty challenging problems,” says Armando Solar-Lezama, head of the computer assisted programming group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

=> ↺ 5 Upcoming Code Editors that May Challenge the Supremacy of Visual Studio Code

Perl / Raku

=> ↺ 2022.52 Antonovmas – Rakudo Weekly News

• Anton Antonov was on a roll this week. Videos, blogs, and fun with Raku in these festive times.

• [...]

• A very quiet week, apart from the many blog posts, videos, new and updated modules :-). The nights are getting shorter again. Good news for many people in Ukraine who have no heating or water or electricity, and who are still fighting the Russian aggression.

Python

=> ↺ Python: Append to File – TecAdmin

• In Python, you can use the open() function to open a file in append mode, which allows you to add new content to the end of an existing file. Appending to a file is useful when you want to add additional information to a file without modifying or deleting the file’s original content.

=> ↺ Python: Write to File – TecAdmin

• Writing to a file in Python is a common operation that allows you to store data in a file for later use. Whether you are working with a simple text file or a more complex binary file, Python provides a number of ways to write data to a file.

Shell

=> ↺ Creating Bash Infinite Loop by Example Scripts

• Every loop has a finite lifespan and depending on the loop, it ends when the condition is either true or false. The bash infinite loop is simply a series of instructions that loops indefinitely. It has no ending condition, a condition that is never met, or a condition that stimulates a new iteration of the loop. The bash infinite loop can be created with the for, while, and until loops. With just a little modification to the infinite loop conventional syntax, we can implement the bash infinite loop scripts. Here, we are required to create a loop that executes the commands continuously until it is forcibly stopped from outside the program.

=> ↺ A Shell Script to Check Disk Space and Send Alert – TecAdmin

• It is important to monitor the disk space on a Linux server to ensure that there is enough free space available for new files and applications. If the disk becomes full, it can cause issues such as system crashes, data loss, and other problems. To prevent these issues, you can use a shell script to monitor the disk space and send an alert when the available space falls below a certain threshold.

• In this article, we will walk through the process of creating a shell script that monitors the disk space and sends an alert when the available space falls below a certain threshold. We will use the df command to check the available disk space and the mail command to send the alert.

Leftovers

=> ↺ So, this is Christmas? – Terence Eden’s Blog

• The Church of England publishes statistics about the numbers of its faithful. These are particularly interesting in light of the recent news that the UK no-longer has a Christian majority.

• The CofE’s statistics are for 2019 – before COVID messed up everything – and I think offer a fascinating glimpse into its future.

• [....]

• The good news is fewer funerals. The bad news is fewer baptisms. In the intervening 5 years, the Church went from losing 16,000 members per year to now losing 25,000 members per year.

• Now, not everyone who enters the Church does so via baptism. And not all of those that do will become a worshipper. Similarly, not every CofE funeral is conducted on behalf of a worshipper, and not every worshipper will want a religious funeral. But those are the numbers we have to work with. So let’s take them as gospel.

• So how many people does the CofE count as worshippers? There are many ways to count that.

=> ↺ My Writing Cycle

• I think a lot of internet writers go through a stage where they focus more on refining their workflow than they do than actually writing. What I’ve noticed is that for me, this can be represented as a sine wave. In that I go through phases of really wanting to nail a perfect workflow for every situation, then periods of time where I just don’t care about how I write, I just get on with putting words somewhere and then publishing it to my blog.

• Right now, I’m at a stage where I feel like I can write a blog post in any application that can handle plain text. In the past few weeks, that’s mainly been Obsidian, but I’ve also used TextEdit recently, and even the Ghost web interface for my blog.

=> ↺ New Years Resolutions 2023: Radical reduction in consumer tech use

• Well, 2022 is coming to an end, and (rather ahead of schedule for me), that means I’m putting together some new years resolutions. This year, they’re a bit more interesting than the usual, because they consist largely of, “To the extent that I am reasonably able, opt out of consumer tech culture.” That includes a range of things, and I’ll go over them here, with the goal that at least some people might be inspired to join me in tilting at these particular windmills, and reducing some of the data collected, aggregated, and used against them in 2023.

• [...]

• For a while now, I’ve generally tried to restrict my internet use during Lent – it’s been a good time to back off, take some time, and just pull the crap out. Coming back, I tend to use the internet less, having separated from the draw of the various forums and social media-ish things (what little shadow of that I use) – but I’ve found that, with time, my use starts creeping back up to where it was before. I’ll respond to a forum thread, check back in more frequently for updates, and after a few months of that cycle, I’m back to something resembling a regular posting schedule. Unfortunately, the change isn’t lasting – and I’ve tried this experiment enough that I know the pattern I’ll slip back into. It’s less than it used to be, but… still. I don’t like that. So, at this point in time, after quite a bit of evaluation, I’ve decided that I simply need to stop engaging so much – I want to “put the internet back in a box,” which I’ll discuss in more detail a bit later.

=> ↺ Book Review: Reality Is Broken – Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World by Jane McGonigal – Terence Eden’s Blog

• I have never felt less like a human being than while reading this book. I don’t mind video-games, I find them mildly diverting. I’ve never gotten in to massively multiplayer online games (unless you count Twitter). I just don’t see what’s appealing about them. Why would I want a bunch of teenagers screaming racial slurs at me when I’m trying to relax?

• [...]

• A new religion. Humans seem hardwired to want to take part in epic stories. To feel like we’re part of history. That our names will be sung about in the future. That we will be heroic. Well… some humans.

• Some of us want to try the occasional novel experience, pretend to be a superhero for a few minutes, and experience an artificially generated dopamine bump.

• This is a good book. But I am the wrong audience for it. It explains a part of the world that I just don’t see and – if I’m honest – distrust. I would love to live in a world where we could harness gaming for good. But I fear the consequences of misdirecting that energy.

=> ↺ The complete Montague Portal on sale for $5.85 at Amazon – Michael W Lucas

• Seriously. You can cost Amazon money by buying one of my books.

=> ↺ Silly Customer Service :: Barry Hess :: bjhess.com

• If you follow me on socials, you might know that I’m working on an idea for making a page online that shows the various things one consumes over time. The starting point is using a Stable Internet Technology™ called RSS to provide the feed of data. Services like Album Whale, Letterboxd, and Goodreads all offer an RSS feed because it provides a way for people to track various web things on their own time using services like Feedly or Feedbin.

• RSS is a bit of an old timer in web world. It was the pipeline for keeping up with things in the 2000s, but has fallen out of fashion with the rise of walled gardens like Twitter and Facebook. In case you haven’t noticed, there is a not-insignificant amount of pushback against these megacorps. While I don’t think they’re going to crash and burn, it does appear that in the future there will be a large share of the market that prefers to tend their online gardens with classic, open technologies.

Science

=> ↺ A huge satellite just launched – astronomers are worried

• Called BlueWalker 3, it’s a prototype by American company AST SpaceMobile, which is to create a space-based mobile broadband network. This is only one of multiple satellites planned for the SpaceMobile constellation – some even bigger than BlueWalker 3.

• “The reason why our satellite is large is because in order to communicate with a low-power, low internal strength phone, you just need a large antenna on one side with a lot of power, and so that’s a critical part of our infrastructure,” AST SpaceMobile Chief Strategy Officer Scott Wisniewski told Space.com.

• “We think that’s really important for communicating directly with regular handsets, with no change to the handset, with no extra burdens on the user.”

=> ↺ NIST Drafts Revised Guidelines for Digital Identification in Federal Systems | NIST

• The U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has drafted updated guidelines to help the nation combat fraud and cybercrime while fostering equity and preserving fundamental human rights. The guidelines support risk-informed management of people’s personas online — their “digital identities” — often required to engage in everyday digital transactions from banking to ordering groceries.

• “These guidelines are intended to help organizations manage risks related to digital identity and get the right services to the right people while preventing fraud, preserving privacy, fostering equity and delivering high-quality, usable services to all,” said Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and NIST Director Laurie E. Locascio. “We are actively seeking feedback not only from technical specialists, but also from advocacy and community engagement groups that have insight into the potential impacts these technologies can have on members of underserved communities and marginalized groups.”

=> ↺ New Process Allows 3-D Printing of Microscale Metallic Parts | www.caltech.edu

• Engineers at Caltech have developed a method for 3-D printing pure and multicomponent metals, at a resolution that is, in some cases, an order of magnitude smaller than previously possible. The process, which uses water-based chemistry and 3-D printing, was described in a paper published in Nature on October 20.

=> ↺ Scientists Apply a Novel Machine Learning Method to Help Diagnose Deadly Respiratory Illness

• An international team of scientists led by UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering professor Pengtao Xie has developed a new algorithm that shows promise in improving the detection of pneumonia from chest x-rays. The new approach includes a two-way confirmation system that could be used as a way to complement the work and expertise of physicians in ways that minimize both human and computer error.

=> ↺ The Other Side Of Physics (TEDxNewcastle)

=> ↺ How Chaos Control is Changing The World

=> ↺ How Does Quantum Uncertainty Work?

=> ↺ New AI Speeds Computer Graphics by Up to 5x

• On 20 September, Nvidia’s vice president of applied deep learning, Bryan Catanzaro, went to Twitter with a bold claim: In certain GPU-heavy games, like the classic first-person platformer Portal, seven out of eight pixels on the screen are generated by a new machine-learning algorithm. That’s enough, he said, to accelerate rendering by up to 5 times.

• This impressive feat is currently limited to a few dozen 3D games, but it’s a hint at the gains that neural rendering will soon deliver. The technique will unlock new potential in everyday consumer electronics.

=> ↺ The Generative AI Revolution in Games

• What’s transformative about this work is not just that it saves time and money while also delivering quality – thus smashing the classic “you can only have two of cost, quality, or speed” triangle. Artists are now creating high-quality images in a matter of hours that would otherwise take weeks to generate by hand.

=> ↺ An algorithm can use WiFi signal changes to help identify breathing issues

• National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) researchers have developed a way to monitor breathing based on tiny changes in WiFi signals. They say their BreatheSmart deep-learning algorithm could help detect if someone in the household is having breathing issues.

• WiFi signals are almost ubiquitous. They bounce off of and pass through surfaces as they try to link devices with routers. But any movement will alter the signal’s path, including how the body moves as we breathe, which can change if we have any issues. For instance, your chest will move differently if you’re coughing.

• Other researchers have explored the use of WiFi signals to detect people and movements, but their approaches required dedicated sensing devices and their studies provided limited data. A few years ago, a company called Origin Wireless developed an algorithm that works with a WiFi mesh network. Similarly, NIST says BreatheSmart works with routers and devices that are already available on the market. It only requires a single router and connected device.

=> ↺ Flying Snakes Help Scientists Design New Robots – AIP Publishing LLC

• Robots have been designed to move in ways that mimic animal movements, such as walking and swimming. Scientists are now considering how to design robots that mimic the gliding motion exhibited by flying snakes.

• In Physics of Fluids, by AIP Publishing, researchers from the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech explored the lift production mechanism of flying snakes, which undulate side-to-side as they move from the tops of trees to the ground to escape predators or to move around quickly and efficiently. The undulation allows snakes to glide for long distances, as much as 25 meters from a 15-meter tower.

=> ↺ Engineers improve electrochemical sensing by incorporating machine learning

• Combining machine learning with multimodal electrochemical sensing can significantly improve the analytical performance of biosensors, according to new findings from a Penn State research team. These improvements may benefit noninvasive health monitoring, such as testing that involves saliva or sweat. The findings were published this month in Analytica Chimica Acta.

=> ↺ Robot Learns Human Trick for Not Falling Over – IEEE Spectrum

• Humanoid robots are a lot more capable than they used to be, but for most of them, falling over is still borderline catastrophic. Understandably, the focus has been on getting humanoid robots to succeed at things as opposed to getting robots to tolerate (or recover from) failing at things, but sometimes, failure is inevitable because stuff happens that’s outside your control. Earthquakes, accidentally clumsy grad students, tornadoes, deliberately malicious grad students—the list goes on.

• When humans lose their balance, the go-to strategy is a highly effective one: Use whatever happens to be nearby to keep from falling over. While for humans this approach is instinctive, it’s a hard problem for robots, involving perception, semantic understanding, motion planning, and careful force control, all executed under aggressive time constraints. In a paper published earlier this year in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, researchers at Inria in France show some early work getting a TALOS humanoid robot to use a nearby wall to successfully keep itself from taking a tumble.

Hardware

=> ↺ Quantum computing used to design heat-blocking glass | Popular Science

• Two researchers at the University of Notre Dame in collaboration with South Korea’s Kyung Hee University recently utilized quantum computing to help develop a new transparent window coating capable of blocking solar heat. In findings published in ACS Energy Levels, Tengfei Luo, Notre Dame’s Dorini Family Professor of Energy Studies, and postdoctoral associate, Seongmin Kim, worked together to devise their transparent radiative cooler (TRC) layer, which only permits external visible light that doesn’t raise indoor temperatures, thus cutting buildings’ cooling costs by as much as a third of current rates. According to the International Energy Agency, air conditioning and electric fans comprise 20 percent of buildings’ energy costs around the world—roughly 10 percent of human electricity consumption.

• To determine the absolute best materials configuration, the team relied on machine learning and the promising field of quantum computing for a solution. Although in its relatively early phases of development, quantum computing offers immense potential due to its ability to far surpass traditional computing methods. Currently, even the most advanced of classical supercomputers rely on a binary state—representing information as 1’s and 0’s—to do all their calculations, meaning that there are limits to what they can and can’t achieve. Quantum computing, in contrast, can represent information as either 1, 0, or a combination of the two. This hypothetically gives scientists a massive advantage in numerous fields, such as natural science simulations and nuclear fusion research.

Linux Foundation

=> ↺ Linux Foundation’s AgStack Project will build dataset of field boundaries – GPS World : GPS World

• On Dec. 20, the Linux Foundation announced its AgStack Project, which will host an open-source code base, along with a fully automated, continuous computation engine that will maintain a global dataset of boundaries for agricultural fields. The AgStack Asset Registry dataset will aid food traceability, carbon tracking, crop production, and other field-level analytics.

Security

=> ↺ Why don’t people just…? : Dissociated Press

• Bit of a rant here, so be warned…

• Caught two threads today with the general gist of “why don’t people just…” –specifically, why haven’t people learned from Twitter or just sucked it up and started using 2FA, no matter what level of computer literacy they might be at.

• Why don’t open source projects just stand up Mattermost instead of Discord? Why haven’t users finally learned and started adopting 2FA?

• In the first instance, I think people just imagine standing up a service and don’t think about the long-term implications of offering a service like Mattermost for a project. There’s a ton of work, and potentially a fair amount of money, involved in offering up a service that’s going to be used by a lot of users 24/7.

• There’s the scaling. There’s the need to apply security fixes whenever they may arise. Not just the service like Mattermost, but all its dependencies, the operating system, the database…

=> ↺ Old: White House announces 100-day cyber sprint for chemical sector

• The chemical industry is the next sector to take up President Biden’s 100-day cybersecurity sprint, the administration announced Wednesday, an effort designed to sharpen operators’ focus on the most significant risks from a digital attack such as gas leaks and other contaminations.

• The sprint also aims to improve information sharing and “analytical coordination” between the public and private sector and encourage chemical manufacturers to deploy threat detection on control systems.

=> ↺ Lower email spoofing incidents (and make your marketing team happy) with BIMI – NVISO Labs

• Over the last couple of years, we saw the amount of phishing attacks skyrocket. According to F5, a multi-cloud security and application provider, there was a 220% increase of incidents during the height of the global pandemic compared to the yearly average. It’s expected that every year there will be an additional increase of 15% in phishing attempts, making it one of the most threatening security risks for a company’s IT department.

=> ↺ The Key Role of the Service Delivery Manager at NVISO’s Managed Detect & Respond Service

• The Service Delivery Manager (SDM) plays a key role in the delivery of our NVISO cybersecurity NITRO Managed Detect & Respond (MDR) services. As the main point of contact, we represent the client at NVISO and represent NVISO at the client. During the operational lifecycle of a contract, my fellow SDMs and I are responsible for the quality of the cybersecurity services delivered and we ensure an efficient relationship and coordination between the customer and the various NVISO internal departments engaged in the delivery of these services.

=> ↺ The Beauty of Being a Cybersecurity Project Manager for NVISO NITRO MDR – NVISO Labs

• Cybersecurity is a dynamic and evolving sector, and we, cybersecurity Project Managers, have the privilege of being right at the centre of the action. We make projects come to life, and seeing the satisfaction of the clients for the results provided and the fulfilment of the colleagues for the great work done is what makes our job so worth it.

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Who’s Watching | Marina Manoukian

• The evolution of the right to privacy

• [...]

• Long before TikToking on the iPhone 14 Pro Max, there was the Kodak Camera, first unveiled in 1888, which made a previously expensive and cumbersome venture comparatively accessible to the masses. By 1896, over one hundred thousand had been sold, and those who couldn’t put them down were dubbed “Kodakers.” Advertisements likened photography to hunting, and men were often shown taking “shots” of women unbeknownst to them. The New York Times observed in 1889 that “if the young lady refuses he will perhaps strive to get her picture when she is not on guard just out of spite.” Photographs of random people were sold everywhere and even given away for free in packs of cigarettes. “Many people felt a profound sense of exposure and violation upon being photographed, or upon finding their photographs displayed and sold in photo shops, or used in advertisements, without their consent,” writes Robert E. Mensel in “Kodakers Lying in Wait.”

Defence/Aggression

=> ↺ UK apology sought for British war crimes in Palestine – BBC News

• The people of al-Bassa got their lesson in imperial brutality when the British soldiers came after dawn.

• Machine guns mounted on Rolls Royce armoured cars opened fire on the Palestinian village before the Royal Ulster Rifles arrived with flaming torches and burned homes to the ground.

• Villagers were rounded up while troops later herded men onto a bus and forced them to drive over a landmine which blew up, killing everyone on board.

• A British policeman photographed the scene as women tended to the remains of their dead, before maimed body parts were buried in a pit.

• It was the autumn of 1938 and UK forces were facing a rebellion in Palestine, under British control after the defeat two decades earlier of the Ottoman Empire.

Environment

Energy

=> ↺ Mars has enough wind to power bases near the poles all year round | New Scientist

• Wind turbines on Mars could theoretically provide enough energy for scientists to safely explore outer regions of the planet during crewed missions.

• Solar energy might be sufficient for investigating Mars near the equator, but to live nearer the poles all year round, other power sources are needed. In combination with solar power, well-placed wind turbines could supply enough energy for a group of six people to live and work on Mars all year round, without the radiation risks associated with nuclear energy, says Victoria Hartwick at the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

• “It’s really exciting that by combining potential wind power with other sources of energy, we open up large parts of the planet to exploration and to these really scientifically interesting zones that the [scientific] community may have previously discredited because of energy requirements,” she says.

Finance

=> ↺ [Old] Where Elma becomes Selma

• Adivasis from Chhattisgarh who have for long migrated to Andhra Pradesh are now returning. But many stay back too, despite poor amenities and an officialdom that misspells their names – because they feel safe

=> ↺ Why points doesn’t equal to saved money

• With everyone looking to save money, there are many people promoting about collecting points (either through a store or credit card). While this sounds great, collecting these points don’t actually equal to saving money, and there are a number of things you should look into before and while doing this.

=> ↺ Mass pub closures hit England and Wales – Michael West

• More than 32 pubs disappeared from communities in England and Wales each month in 2022 as rocketing energy bills and staffing pressures forced businesses to shut for the final time.

• New analysis of official government data by real estate adviser Altus group found the overall number of pubs slid by 386 during the year.

• The total number of pubs in England and Wales, including those vacant and being offered to let, fell to 39,787 in December compared with 40,173 at the same time last year.

=> ↺ [Old] The Deeper Malaise Behind Rupee’s Free Fall | NewsClick

• The fact that forex reserves left with RBI to defend the rupee have been declining only strengthen expectations of a further fall, and entails an even greater assault on working wages.

=> ↺ What Does the Fed’s Jerome Powell Have Up His Sleeve? | WEB OF DEBT BLOG

• The Real Goal of Fed Policy: Breaking Inflation, the Middle Class or the Bubble Economy? “There is no sense that inflation is coming down,” said Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell at a November 2 press conference, — this despite eight months of aggressive interest rate hikes and “quantitative tightening.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

=> ↺ [Old] How Wisconsin Became the GOP’s Laboratory for Dismantling Democracy – Mother Jones

• ice in suburban Milwaukee, located in a shopping plaza next to a dentist and an acupuncturist, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers scans the brightly colored maps that hang on the walls. They depict the tortuously shaped legislative districts drawn in a state now regarded as one of the most gerrymandered in the nation. “Who in their right minds could’ve made them up?” Evers asks.

• The answer: Republicans in the state legislature. Evers saw firsthand the impact of GOP control of the redistricting process when he ran for governor in 2018. That year, Democrats swept all five statewide races and won 53 percent of votes cast for the state assembly, but the party retained just 36 percent of seats in the chamber. “It’s real simple,” Evers says, after eating a Five Guys burger for lunch. “All the statewide elected officials are Democrats… But then you go into the legislature and it’s almost two-thirds Republicans. There’s something wrong with that picture.”

=> ↺ Crucifying Haiti

• Foreign interventions have plagued Haiti since the mid-19th century. Virtually every world power indulged in coercive “gunboat diplomacy” to meddle in Haitian domestic affairs. Christopher Young amply demonstrates that France, Britain, the United States, Canada, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Norway sent warships to bully Port-au-Prince into submission on multiple occasions throughout the late 1800s. Washington, Paris, and especially Berlin could hardly conceal their disdain for an independent and black-majority nation.

=> ↺ Israel and the Rise of Jewish Fascism

• The mask is being lifted from the face of Israel’s apartheid state, exposing a grinning death’s head that portends the obliteration of the few restraints against killing Palestinians.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ Freedom of reach IS freedom of speech

• The platforms treat your unambiguous request to receive messages from others as mere suggestions, a “signal” to be mixed into other signals in the content moderation algorithm that orders your feed, mixing in items from strangers whose material you never asked to see.

• There’s nothing wrong in principle with the idea of a system that recommends items from strangers. Indeed, that’s a great way to find people to follow! But “stuff we think you’ll like” is not the same category as “stuff you’ve asked to see.”

• Why do companies balk at showing you what you’ve asked to be shown? Sometimes it’s because they’re trying to be helpful. Maybe their research, or the inferences from their user surveillance, suggests that you actually prefer it that way.

=> ↺ Trust in online content moderation depends on moderator | Cornell Chronicle

• More than 40% of U.S. adults have experienced some form of online harassment, according to Pew Research surveys, highlighting the need for content moderation on social media, which helps prevent and remove offensive or threatening messages.

• But who – or what – are the moderators policing the cyber landscape? And can they be trusted to act as gatekeepers for safe content?

• An interdisciplinary collaboration with Marie Ozanne, assistant professor of food and beverage management at the Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration, in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, found that both the type of moderator – human or AI – and the “temperature” of the harassing content influenced people’s perception of the moderation decision and the moderation system.

Civil Rights/Policing

=> ↺ The Biggest Obstacle To Real Freedom Is The Belief That We Already Have It – Caitlin Johnstone

• If you live in one of the so-called free democracies of the western world, the worst mistake you can make is to buy into the hype. To believe you are a free individual in a nation that respects and protects your freedom and individuality.

• Whenever I broach this subject I always get a deluge of objections along the lines of, “Well I’d much rather live where I live than under an authoritarian regime like in Iran or China! You would never be allowed to criticize your rulers the way you do if you lived in one of those places!”

• And I always want to ask them, what do you think drove you to make that objection? Why are you falling all over yourself to defend your country and the people who rule over you, while condemning foreign countries that your own government happens to dislike? Could it be because that’s how you’ve been trained to behave from a young and impressionable age, and that your objection is arising from the same place as a cult member’s objections to criticisms of their cult?

• Because that’s ultimately what holds power structures together in the US-aligned nations of the global north: indoctrination. The same thing used to program religious extremists and cult members. The only difference is that rather than scripture and religious leaders, the means of indoctrination is school, mainstream media, and Silicon Valley algorithm manipulation.

=> ↺ Ideas, Including Foolish Ones, Have Consequences – FPIF

• Is the radical right pure hate and all emotion?

• Well, they may start from that, but humans that they are, some of them try to rationalize their hates and fears into theories that, though detached from reality, literally provide the ammunition that enables their followers to wreak havoc, like the guy did who descended on a store frequented by Black people in Buffalo several months ago in order to kill as many African-Americans as possible.

• Matthew Rose’s A World After Liberalism (Yale University, 2021) brings together and critically analyzes the thoughts of people that most of us probably have not heard of but are worshiped in far right networks around the world. Rose says we better listen to what these guys are saying, even if we find them utterly distasteful, because their ideas have consequences.

• Steve Bannon, the incendiary Trump adviser, may be the best known activist of the international far right, but he has derived inspiration from otherwise little known figures on the fringes of history, underlining the wisdom in Keynes’ well-known observation: “Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

=> ↺ Vint Cerf Helped Create the Internet on the Back of an Envelope

• Much has changed in the world of cyberspace since Jan. 1, 1983, the date often called “the birthday of the internet.” Yet the internet’s fundamental architecture—the communications protocol that allows computer networks all over the world to talk to each other—remains essentially the same. This is largely thanks to a design that Vint Cerf sketched on the back of an envelope while holed up with fellow computer scientist Robert Kahn in a Palo Alto cabana nearly 50 years ago.

Monopolies

=> ↺ Oligopoly Unchecked | Michael Hudson

• Well, I grew up in a Marxist household. My father was a political prisoner, one of the Minneapolis 17.1 Minneapolis was the only city in the world that was a Trotskyist city, and my parents worked with Trotsky in Mexico. So, I grew up not having any intention of going into economics. I wanted to be a musician, and when I was 21, I began writing a history of the connection between music, art, drama theory, and the Renaissance in the 19th century. But then I went to New York and went to work on Wall Street just to get a job. I met the translator of Marx’s Theories of Surplus Value, Terence McCarthy, who convinced me that economics was more interesting than anything else that was happening. He became my mentor, I took a PhD in economics, and that’s it.

Gemini* and Gopher

Personal

=> ↺ Getting Back into Final Fantasy XIV

• It’s probably no small surprise that I enjoy MMORPGs seeing as they’ve taken up a disproportionally large amount of discussion related to video games on this capsule. Depending on the game, they can have a pretty decent mix of exploration, story, bopping things in dungeons, enjoyable things to do that don’t involve dungeons, and if we’re really lucky it might even have a very nice / kind community. Of all the games that I’ve played in the genre, Elder Scrolls Online, Guild Wars 2, and Final Fantasy XIV have checked the most boxes on that list. Well, they check all of those boxes to be honest.

Technical

=> ↺ On limits of Code and Data

• The history of general-purpose computing has been a never-stopping expansion of addressable memory space (and with it, bit-width of registers to access such memory). It is my conjecture that we’ve long passed the limits of reasonable.

• I will stick to the practical aspects of Harn implementation — based on much previous experience implementing 8-, 9-, 12-, 16-, 18-, 24-, 32- and 64-bit systems. When I say experience, I mean actual nose-to-the-ground coding in assembly, not setting a flag on some compiler and changing some #defines… (not that there is anything wrong with that…)

=> ↺ GmCapsule: Extensible Gemini/Titan Server

• I’ve been relying on Agate since the beginning, but now I increasingly want to serve dynamic content and handle more advanced requests, so it was time to upgrade instead of running little ad-hoc servers on side ports.

=> ↺ It’s not a “security hole,” it’s a “privacy hole” and I don’t think it’s anything to worry about

• Imagine a scenario where Big Tech does a massive marketing campaign in an attempt to mainstream the protocol. As part of their marketing, they could try to sell the idea of a Big Proprietary browser, or even add Gemini support directly into their existing web browser. Then they start a disinformation campaign to demonize the wide range of existing clients. Normies, naturally, would buy that without question, as they do. At that point, Big Tech could simply have their browser automatically generate a client certificate for every user and attach it to every request.

Programming

=> ↺ Tarai

• The tarai function recently came to my attention; the context was music composition, or the art of creating hopefully neither boring nor terrible sounds from the emissions of some algorithm.

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